Road trip! Road trip! Road trip! I love road trips. Sometimes I
complain because it'd be much faster to fly to LA to see my dad, and spouse
refuses to fly, but really - road trips are fun!
We drove down a semi-coastal route and were constantly greeted by happy,
smiling lupine faces. They were everywhere - sparkling blue and
white. When we got down to Santa Luis Obispo there was this amazing pink
bloom that looked like it was attached to a grass. I don't know what it
was. Doing 70 mph botany is a good way to get cross-eyed and carsick. Just
north of Malibu, the hills were covered with a yellow daisy that looked
like a marguerite bush stuck on top of a stout central trunk.
Wacky-looking plants. I found out later that they were Coreopsis
gigantea.
My dad organized a trip for us to Santa Catalina Island, one of the Channel
Islands off the California coast. My dad did some research for me on the
flora of the island and so I got all excited beforehand, looking at plant
lists and learning about conservation strategies they are using on the
island. The island has a lot of endemic plant species and there is a
botanical garden there to showcase them. There is only the one town on the
island and the rest is wild country. It was really great to see some
pristine coastal vegetation - the area has never been grazed by cattle and
has never been developed. Just miles and miles of coastal scrub laid over
beautiful mountainous terrain. The wild part of the island is a big
conservancy and they have their work cut out for them, trying to keep the
place from being overrun by exotic weeds.  The botanical garden had
spectacular succulent plants from all over the world and then a section for
the Santa Catalina endemics. The garden was awesome, in part because they
weren't shy about labeling the same plant species multiple times. Each
ironwood tree in the garden was labeled as such. The reinforcement helped
me learn how to spot the different species. This picture is from a driving
tour we took - Lemonadeberry, a Catalina endemic, is in the foreground.
On our trip back from LA we took Interstate 5 up the central valley of
California.  It really seemed like spring in the San Gabriel Mountains
above LA - it was actually green. This is a picture I took near the very
top of the grapevine. The hills had an orange sheen of California
poppies. The yellow is some kind of goldfields, I think. Then
up through miles of desert scrub with orchards of apples and
almonds and a few cotton fields. On the pass over the
coastal foothills, we were once again greeted by lupines - this time
of the white variety. The shady oaks and redwoods of Mount
Madonna felt like home, even though Pacifica is coastal scrub without many
trees at all.
To check out the activities of the conservancy for Santa Catalina,
including their exotics eradication program and a plant list for the area,
go to catalinaconservancy.org
If you ever want to see pictures of the plants I talk about in these entries, most of them can be found here:
http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/photos/flora/
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